Peer to peer died because (1) a lot of the world, especially outside the US, has terrible upload/bandwidth, (2) HTTPS CDNs got _really_ cheap, far cheaper that p2p technologies like BitTorrent+WebSeed.

There are a minority of users who care about being able to host videos that violate YouTube/TikTok/Instagram policies. Unfortunately, a significant part of that minority is working with infringing or illegal content, which both prevents ad networks from working with you and attracts attention from law enforcement.

Delivering the bits is not the hard part of making a successful video platform. It's other stuff like recommendations and content discovery that is actually useful, allowing creators to monetize enough that they want to be on your platform, navigating legal issues, fighting spam and abuse, and getting enough users to sign up and start using your service.

That would put users at risk of being sued/punished for copyright infrigement.

(One of the) NewPipe devs here: I've been dreaming of something like a Worldwide Video (WWV) for a while. Essentially, instead of having one huge platform you would have many smaller platforms. These would talk the same content language, like HTML/HTTP for the Web, so you could have Video browsers like PipePipe, NewPipe or others that could aggregate and display the content from these platforms. Peertube kind of goes into that direction, but the Peertube network just like other similar platforms/systems have many problems right now. These often suffer from lacking content moderation, a strong network effect towards bigger platforms and a well scalable content provisioning (CDN costs money and P2P is complicated) for example.

That's what PeerTube does. If enough people are watching the same thing, the clients start to serve blocks of the video to other clients, taking load off the hosting server. There's still only one hosting server. It just scales for popular videos.

Nobody uses PeerTube much. I put technical videos on Hardlimit because it doesn't insert ads. I don't care about "discovery"; they're for a tiny audience that comes in from postings elsewhere. Works fine for that. The client side is all Javascript in user's browsers.

this is exactly why i worked on webtorrent ~13 years ago https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent

yes, will you also be providing the caching server? Because that's the main blocker I think, nobody has the resources to cache them.

With no end in sight to the increasing cost of storage I can't imagine a worse time to put the burden of video storage onto users.

Even forgetting that issue, the last thing I want is to use some unknown, unpredictably changing residential connection for my videos. Google has invested in a powerful edge network so they can server my videos lightning quick.

there exist distributed alternatives like joinpeertube.org but they never really take off. Consumers like centralization, look at twitter.

AFAIK Newpipe is mobile only, so I don't really see how that'd work.

P2P is great on desktop computers (and, in the modern age, Smart TV boxes), where your network connection has no data cap, there are no battery concerns, you're unlikely to be behind CGNAT (common for cellular data connections), and the app can surreptitiously minimize itself to tray instead of closing itself outright, making you an unwitting seed.

How do you verify you get the right data from your peers? With torrents we know the correct hashes for each block. YouTube probably doesn't do this.

How do you ensure people upload the original video and do not tamper with it?

Pretty much worse user experience guaranteed, plz no.

I honestly don't see how those two things are related.

The problem with P2P video is that it's expensive to host and most of the people using it are going to use it for child abuse. It makes it not realistic.

NewPipe has a one-click download button. If one follows channels with mainly-audio content that one may want to listen to later, possibly away from an internet connection, that is super-handy.

NewPipe also lets you export your subscriptions (which is just a bunch of links to RSS feeds), so you aren't shackled to Android/RSS.

One of the reasons why I use an app to view YouTube is to disable suggested videos and comments. Basically, I want to have a personalized list of the channels I view as worth watching and I want to discourage continued watching outside of those boundaries.

Solid take, these days most apps are just glorified browser wrappers and you don't miss out on anything. In fact, you could have a separate browser with all these saving modes disabled just for the youtube use case.

Have you tried the Firefox extension "Video Background Play Fix"?

This has worked flawlessly for me on every phone I've used.

I use NewPipe so I can subscribe to channels and put channels/videos into playlists, without needing to make a youtube account.

Have you tried disabling the Page Visibility API? Web apps will sometimes use that to try and mess with background playing, IIRC.

Mobile Firefox with background playing is really bad, do they just stop everything "to save battery?" I use Brave only to stream web radio while in the kitchen.

agreeable argument. I am also running towards firefox, but keeping the firefox open, juggling between the tabs, especially the quirks YT poses on Firefox, these apps poses a usecase. Yes, download/subscribe/SB support etc. Currently using libretube mostly.

Who do you want to operate the app for you on their server at their expense?

> Used through all of the apps and personally there's little incentive for me not to use Firefox/Fennec.

Your comment made me try Firefox for the Nth time right now.

And the rendering is still bad like I remembered it. Download the image locally and open it in an image viewer so you actually view the pixels 1:1, then see if you can tell which one is Firefox (I can): https://imgur.com/a/FsXuoa3

I'm staying with Chrome.

I have watch history in NewPipe just fine? And I find it very convenient to know what I've already watched. All local, Google doesn't need to store it for you / you can't lose access to it

Is it a problem for you that YouTube's watch history is littered with videos you didn't watch, but got recorded as being watched because the mouse pointer moved over one of their suggestions for a moment.

I just use skipvids.com rather than installing an invidious fork that constantly breaks

I think it's been about 6 months or more for me and I am also very satisfied with it. I left NewPipe because I'd often have to wait days to weeks for simple fixes to get implemented. PipePipe is patched very often.

Same. It's also less buggy, and they've fixed long-standing navigation gripes I had with NewPipe. I did disable the SponsorBlock integration because I find it quite annoying to go back on a skipped sequence.

Same. My only issue (with NewPipe also) is that at ~50 subscribed channels, Google rate limits me when I refresh. I wish there was better logic to get new content or a way to space it out over an amount of time.

Thank you for sharing, it really seems to be a great app!

Limusic on desktop has been good for me too

Why don’t you care about privacy specifically in this context?

Oh? I recently stopped using revanced when updates stopped and my older revanced stopped working correctly. Is it back?

Does it auto-update now? I like its UI better than PipePipe, but I got so sick of hand-updating Vanced (including hand-downloading the correct apk and waiting several minutes for the patches to run against it) every time Google breaks Youtube again. There was a period of Warfare last year where Google would make breaking changes more than once a week...

PipePipe is so nice with the fast auto-updates. If I ever even catch it breaking, I just have to use Firefox for a few hours and then F-Droid ships the fix and PipePipe works again.

From https://newpipe.net/blog/pinned/newpipe-and-online-advertisi...:

> In summary, it can be said that sponsoring is a good approach. It is fair and non-discriminating to all users, preserves their privacy, lets creators select their partners themselves, and provides them with a larger share of the revenue. Even though there are some disadvantages, it is more or less beneficial for all sides. [...] Ethical advertising, for example through sponsorship, should therefore not be touched by us. This would turn our key selling proposition from being privacy-friendly to being a gatekeeper for advertising. And this is not what NewPipe ever has been or wants to be. We’ve always stressed that NewPipe’s main goal is to protect the users by maintaining their privacy, not to, e.g., provide features a user would otherwise have to pay for, for free. Regarding SponsorBlock: after a lot of discussion within the team, we decided not to support this system. As stated earlier, we don’t consider advertising in general problematic. It’s the unethical, privacy-invasive systems that are very common today which we consider evil. Sponsorship provides a mostly ethical way of advertising.

They wrote about it here: https://newpipe.net/blog/pinned/newpipe-and-online-advertisi...

> Just noticed, now that Tubular is no longer maintained

How have you just noticed that when Tubular reliably broke every single month when YouTube changes something and you had to wait for weeks for it to be fixed? It was barely maintained for a long time now

Yes, people want this.

I love sponsorblock, it feels like adblock felt the first time I installed it.

Every time I see a creator I like do a "smooth transition" from content to ad, it makes me feel betrayed. Not only are they about to read words someone else wrote for them and which they don't really believe, they spent an extra 15 seconds pretending it was part of the video in order to keep my full attention when they throw the sponsor name in my face. It's scummy behaviour.

Creators need sponsors to pay the bills, just as they do ads, I get it. I don't fault them for the industry basically forcing them into these kinds of "integrated ad reads", as well as the fact basically all the sponsors have huge ethical problems. But I will not subject myself or the people who watch videos with me or on my devices to this brain rot.

That's why I try to support them in other ways (YouTube Premium, Patreon, etc.) and run adblock and sponsorblock on everything. By my napkin math, they make more this way anyways.

Tried the autoskip youtube apk, and the default assuming one would prefer autoskip is intriguing; yes that's among the first feature I change to just show skip button on all of detected segment. Another is tap to seek.

You can choose which categories of segments (sponsorships, interaction reminders, etc) auto-skip in the settings. You can also change them from auto-skip to manual skip via a "Skip" button that appears overlaid on the video.

This is such a weird take, sorry. The only argument against it you bring up is that it feels annoying; which would be valid in theory but then you say you "double tap forward a couple of times" instead? Notably, you never know how long an ad is so you have to tap a few times, check, tap again, maybe tap backwards because now you accidentally skipped too far and missed actual content...

How is that LESS annoying?

sounds like it's set to skip tangents/self-promotion by default. There should be a setting to leave those alone and only skip actual sponsor segments.

We're talking about content where the primary motivation for creating it is displaying ads in between in order to make revenue. For instance: I'm watching some video about repairing an old car, and suddenly there is a sponsor segment where the mechanic talks about branded supplements for 5 minutes. Why would I take health advice from a car mechanic? I think this is dishonest advertising and I would actually prefer to skip these videos altogether, but yt doesn't offer that in a search filter. So i use Sponsorblock.

For comparison: say you're getting a haircut. And halfway they stop cutting to promote their new book, for 5 minutes straight. Telling you they would not be able to provide you with the haircut if they cannot promote the book.

Morphe just patches the YouTube app no? Then you need to still use that abomination. NewPipe/PipePipe is fast, lightweight and I couldn't care less about any "features" other than watching a video.

What's the benefit of Morphe over Revanced? I've been using Vanced or Revanced for years, but I'm willing to change.

Bad name though, first few results for "Morphe" is a well-known make-up brand.

This is more for privacy rather than a YouTube app mod

If this is in reference to sponsorblock: I see this argument often but it's never made sense to me. There's no world in which not using sponsorblock leads to me spending money on the advertised product. It simply saves me 4-5 presses of the "skip forward" button.

It's like when a telemarketer calls, I tell them, there's zero chance of me buying anything, so save us both some time and don't call again.

You are right. In my subscription list, around 15 channels, there are a few channels who offer patreon subscriptions for 1-2 euros. In my opinion more channels should try to offer this. I don't think they get that much from ads/premium user view.

About NewPipe, which I've tried it in the past, I have to say it was a better app than Youtube's official app, and I'm not talking about the fact it was blocking ads. For example, three weeks ago, the new Youtube app upgraded to a new GUI, and all those filters in the subscriptions list (not watched, continue watching etc) disappeared or at least I can't find them anymore. It's like this new version is trying to make you not see old stuff or wants you to lose time scrolling instead of watching videos. I use very little the Youtube app because TV screen + browser with extensions (there are no ads blocked on Youtube on my PC) + KDE Connect offer a much better viewing experience.

Nobody forces them into this, they can make their videos members only in the platform of their choice and only monetize with membership.

No (realistic) amount of money can protect an app like this from Alphabet. It's their service, and clients like NewPipe are always at risk of being depreciated forever.

I have been using adblockers since perhaps 2012 and now have it on my router.

I don't think I missed anything, or in some cases where ads are unavoidable, ever decided to buy something because of ads. I do my own research for purchases.

In other words, the conversion rate is near zero for me.

I don't care what others do, but it's a waste of compute and network bandwidth to try to target me. Ad lords had better use that resource to target someone else.

I’m using https://github.com/Tonwalter888/YouMod on my iPhone and I’m very satisfied. It has integrated adblock, sponsorblock, and despite being modded stock YouTube app it has tons of features, like completely removing shorts from the app, customizing the UI, and more.

Get https://github.com/yattee/yattee

I've been watching youtube without ads on all Apple hardware for years.

I use invidious as backend.

https://github.com/iv-org/invidious

Absolutely fabulous.

Although not a direct equivalent, but check out Unwatched [1].

[1]: https://github.com/fer0n/Unwatched

Yep, it’s pretty much the reason I don’t use Youtube on my iPhone almost at all.

It’s probably a good thing, actually.

Connect to VPN in Albania and you will get ad free YouTube experience. You are welcome.

Just use Unwatched or Yattee

Yes, it happens quite often recently. I think, their approach is "dominate and tolerate" in a controllable way, so they know quite a bit about who is actually using NewPipe, yt-dlp, etc. and they tolerate it in order to have a kind of leverage to preserve their monopoly. Then if number of out-of-official-app views becomes like above certain point, they aggressively block with "bot detected" message.

totally...

Funnily what I found was to install 1.1.1.1 from cloudflare. Enable that. PipePipe works perfectly.

newpipe has been working consistently for me. Have you updated

You’re free to put ads and I’m free to not watch them. What the issue ?

How is blocking in-video apps stealing from creators? If the advertiser pays them per view, your view still counts. If they pay a commission per purchase, it doesn't matter if you skipped the ad if you wouldn't have bought the product anyway, and I doubt you buy every single advertised products to support creators.

Posting YouTube videos can just be a hobby - it was in the beginning, and that was fine. It's OK if posting a video isn't a profitable career path. Enthusiasts > "creators".

And in-video ads like these are even less defensible given that they still show up when people are paying YouTube (and creators by extension) to not display ads.

I respect your stance. A couple counter points from personal experience: even if I can't skip the ads, I'm not paying attention - I immediately mute/tune out. And the ads are typically so obnoxious that the reflex to ignore/avoid is only magnified. Is that so different from having a mechanism to auto skip/mute?

Out of the options "creators released content only behind paywalls", "users steal from creators", and "creators incentivised platforms to lobby to remove user freedom so users can't steal from creators", what actually happened was, by far, my least preferable option.

Firefox with sponsorblock installed and ublock origin?

Freetube is pretty great, also you can import your newpipe subs. Http://Freetubeapp.io

Shameless promotion here but I think https://channelsurfer.tv is a good experience.

It's not that well known, but mpv supports playing youtube videos. I think you need yt-dlp installed.

Brave browser.

I'm not sure about transferring subscriptions between Pipe and Brave...?

Freetube if it's still working? I haven't tried it in a while.

Grayjay I'd say. Also works great on Android.

Chrome with sponsorblock and ublock origin lite

Freetube?

Tubular has been shut down.

"This repo is discontinued.

I can no longer dedicate time to this project.

For alternatives, see:

    PipePipe: https://github.com/InfinityLoop1308/PipePipe
    Morphe: https://morphe.software/
"

Says it was archived in July? https://github.com/polymorphicshade/Tubular

Confidently incorrect. As others have mentioned it is shutdown.

Use Invidious, self-hosted or otherwise with the Sponsorblock extension and you get these benefits everywhere - mobile, desk/lap/${whatever}top instead of just on a single device. Yes, you need a mobile browser which supports extensions but then again, you want to block ads and other malcontent anyway so you may as well use Firefox or one of its derivatives.